London Life

Ice Age

Records suggest that ‘iced cream’ or ‘creamed ice’ was adopted in Europe as early as medieval times. In the 17th century, Charles II is said to have enjoyed ‘one plate of white strawberries and one plate of iced cream’, and by 1718, the first recipe was published by a Mrs Mary Eales in London.

Such had been the demand for ice that the wealthy nobility built icehouses on their estates. From the mid 1800s they enjoyed what was very much a luxury given that ice cream had to be made and served immediately.

They employed skilled ‘ice chefs’ known as ‘confectioners’ who answered directly to the lady of the house, not the cook, and had their separate kitchen (the one at Syon House, west London, still exists). In winter, gardeners would crack ice with wooden mallets from the Thames, ponds and canals and transfer it to zinc-lined wooden chests and underground chambers. Those were the days when fridges were as big as houses.

In central London there are former icehouses at Holland Park, a round building with a tiled roof, unusual in being entirely above ground (it now serves as a gallery space), and at Kenwood House where the dairy had an ice well beneath its central room.

Then, along came Carlo Gatti, a Swiss émigré, settling in Holborn’s Italian neighbourhood, to open a café specialising in chocolate and ice cream. In 1857, he cut ice from the Regent’s Canal as well as having it imported from Norway. He built a large ‘ice well’ capable of storing blocks of ice in the nearby Battlebridge Basin and evidence remains of his icehouse, which today forms part of London’s Canal Museum near Kings Cross.

He built a second ice well five years later to become the largest importer in London, running a fleet of delivery carts, supplying ice for domestic iceboxes. Work typically started before dawn with men gathering at the milk-shops with their barrows.

In 1851 Gatti operated from Hungerford Market with his nephews as waiters, offering ice cream as a street snack affordable to all. The ‘penny lick’, a penny’s-worth of ice cream, caught on fast and was bought from a cart and served in a shell or glass. By the late Victorian era, its popularity boomed thanks to cookery writer Agnes Marshall, ‘the queen of the ices’, whose “cornets with cream”, published in 1888, made the ice cream cone a middle-class sensation. Soon, the streets of London echoed with ice cream sellers shouting their wares. But by the turn of the century, health scares put paid to these outlets.

It was about this time that the use of electricity and gas for refrigeration revolutionalised the industry as ice cream was transportable quickly to become a mass-market product and with many of its flavours best sellers.

After the First World War, the first mobile ice cream outlets weren’t vans but bicycles from which Wall’s sold the produce of their Acton factory. It was a staggering success and in no time they had over 50 tricycles with their slogan “Stop Me and Buy One”. But business was hit by the Second World War as tricycles became requisitioned for the war effort.

In the 1950s the large influx of Italians to London introduced the gelaterias or ‘ice cream parlours’ that still exist: there’s one at Fortnum’s and one at Harrods with 13 traditional gelato and sorbet flavours.

A decade later ice cream vans crept into fashion offering their reassuringly familiar jingles which suffer, despite an extension from four seconds to 12, from being illegal before noon or after 7pm and when the vehicle is stationary.

Now ice cream is enjoying a resurgence. This recent boom in ice cream parlours you can see at Scoop, Gelupo, Milk Train, Gelato Mio, Morelli, Udderlicious, Venchi, Unico and many more are springing up.

This summer (from July 3- September 30), Scoop: The Wonderful World of Ice Cream is an exhibition by Bompas & Parr at Gasholders London, near Kings Cross. Celebrating 300 years since Mary Eales’ original recipe, guests can experience ice cream ‘weather’ and the world’s first ‘glow-in-the-dark’ ice cream at Conehenge, the on-site café. How refreshing.

Adam Jacot de Boinod was a researcher for BBC series ‘QI’. He is the author of “The Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordinary Words from around the World”, published by Penguin Books